About

She Was Poetry But He Couldn't Read is a melodramatic phrase initially intended to be a six-word story posted in 2015. In 2018, it became known as the start of a Tumblr copypasta in which people replied mockingly to the phrase using song lyrics. In 2020, the phrase evolved into exploitable Twitter memes in which Twitter users paired two images to the phrase to signify someone not understanding the beauty in something else.

Origin

On December 25th, 2015, Redditor Proxify posted the text "She was poetry. He couldn't read." to r/sixwordstories.^[1] The post gained over 180 points (95% upvoted) in five years.

Spread

On March 11th, 2018, Tumblr user Supremesaudi^[2] posted the phrase and garnered over 369,600 notes in two years. On March 1st, 2019, a screenshot of replies to the Tumblr post was reposted to r/tumblr^[3] (shown below, left). The post received over 880 points (97% upvoted) in a year. The thread reads: "she was poetry, but he couldn't read/ His name was jarred he's nineteen/when his parents built a very strange machine/ watch that scene dig in the dancing queen/ aaaay macarena/ horrible job everyone." On August 13th, 2019, Twitter user @earthboundfb^[4] posted a Facebook screenshot of the copypasta thread (shown below, right). The tweet garnered over 400 likes in nine months (shown below, right).

Twitter Comparisons

On May 11th, Twitter user @cowbojs^[6] used images from Red Dead Redemption to represent "she" and "he" (shown below, left). The tweet received over 790 likes in 10 days. The next day, Twitter user @spdrvrs^[7] posted a variation using the film Parasite (shown below, right). The tweet accumulated over 559,700 likes and 120 retweets in eight days. Stay Hipp^[5] published an article on the Twitter meme.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References